Beckett's Art of Mismaking

Readers have long responded to Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays with wonder or bafflement. They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean?

In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Beckett’s strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called “creative willed mismaking,” “logoclasm,” or “word-storming in the name of beauty,” Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom.

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking explains Beckett’s views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long career—his strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to “fail better,” and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality.

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Beckett's Art of Mismaking

Readers have long responded to Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays with wonder or bafflement. They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean?

In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Beckett’s strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called “creative willed mismaking,” “logoclasm,” or “word-storming in the name of beauty,” Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom.

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking explains Beckett’s views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long career—his strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to “fail better,” and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality.

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Beckett's Art of Mismaking

Beckett's Art of Mismaking

by Leland de la Durantaye
Beckett's Art of Mismaking

Beckett's Art of Mismaking

by Leland de la Durantaye

eBook

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Overview

Readers have long responded to Samuel Beckett’s novels and plays with wonder or bafflement. They portray blind, lame, maimed creatures cracking whips and wielding can openers who are funny when they should be chilling, cruel when they should be tender, warm when most wounded. His works seem less to conclude than to stop dead. And so readers quite naturally ask: what might all this be meant to mean?

In a lively and enlivening study of a singular creative nature, Leland de la Durantaye helps us better understand Beckett’s strangeness and the notorious difficulties it presents. He argues that Beckett’s lifelong campaign was to mismake on purpose—not to denigrate himself, or his audience, nor even to reconnect with the child or the savage within, but because he believed that such mismaking is in the interest of art and will shape its future. Whether called “creative willed mismaking,” “logoclasm,” or “word-storming in the name of beauty,” Beckett meant by these terms an art that attacks language and reason, unity and continuity, art and life, with wit and venom.

Beckett’s Art of Mismaking explains Beckett’s views on language, the relation between work and world, and the interactions between stage and page, as well as the motives guiding his sixty-year-long career—his strange decision to adopt French as his literary language, swerve from the complex novels to the minimalist plays, determination to “fail better,” and principled refusal to follow any easy path to originality.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674495852
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 01/04/2016
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 208
File size: 650 KB

About the Author

Leland de la Durantaye is Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Note on Sources and Abbreviations Introduction: The Art of Mismaking Artistic Character By No Definition Is It Difficult?, or On Riddles Watt? Word-Storming, or Logoclasm Hic sunt leones A Brief Bit of Biography Balzac, Bathos, Chloroform, Clockwork The Artifice of Artificiality Excessive Freedom, or Drama Playing God, or L’inemmerdable Artificiality, or The Hatchet Is Mightier Than the Pencil Chapter 2. The Will to Mismake, or Fish and Chips M Is for . . . The Issue, or Fellowship The Life of the Mind How Not to Read Philosophy, or Reading Schopenhauer The Artist’s View Chapter 3. Nature Painting Landscape Painting and the Forest of Symbols Chapter 4. The Alibi of a Foreign Language In French and on Style Pour faire remarquer moi, or The Need to Be Ill-Equipped ReJoyce Animism Chapter 5. To Hell with All This Fucking Scenery Chapter 6. No Symbols Where None Intended Mud The Gravity of Symbolism Allegory Chapter 7. The Psychopathology of Character Creation, or The Series The Series 2 to 3 Logoclasm Slight Excesses of Language How It Will Be Critics, Bastards, Shutting Off Fail Better Negative Capability Aesthetic Pessimism How History Works The Human Condition Reading Kafka, or Serenity and Disaster The Christmas Tree Notes Works Cited Acknowledgments Index
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